The Year of Living Doggedly
The book started when Rui, a nine week old labradoodle, came into my life shortly after I stopped teaching high school. Many of my blog posts over the next year were ironic essays about the challenge of training and living with a puppy, a subject about which I had known nothing but was now learning rapidly.
Jane Siberry sang, "The whole world reminds me of my dog / My dog reminds me of the whole world." Writing about Rui was writing about the world, and about my new place in it in particular. He related to the (real) elephant I'd been sent from India a half century ago, to my time at MIT, to racists, and to iPods. Most of all, he related to who I was when I was no longer a high school teacher. The parallels outgrew blog posts as they went deeper, and became the book... eventually (a word which lasted about three times as long as I had thought it would.)
The ebook has 100 colour photos from that year, taken by Diana Meredith and me. The dog blog has ongoing stories and pictures from Rui's life after the period of the book. Comments are welcomed. You can choose to read two chapters from the book, which might convince you to buy it, or not. Or you could write to me, and I'll answer, unless you're a troll or a spambot.